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Going where no-one has gone before

Abstract/Description

Yle (Finnish Broadcasting Company) is the pioneer in digital transformation and one of the leading public service media companies in Europe. We are public funded and share the experiences and knowledge we have within industries. Two years ago Yle received “The Best Lean Performance of the Year” award in Finland. What we have achieved in Lean-Agile is now one of the top benchmarks as well in Finnish corporates as in European Broadcast Union (EBU).

We have travelled a long way but we are still at the beginning of our transformation story. The transformation in Yle started from the development of digital services. In that area, there were plenty of benchmarks to draw upon, even when this transformation work started ten years ago. Even at the company strategy and portfolio levels, there were benchmarks in software development to draw influences from.

Toward that goal, we have focused in other areas than the development of digital services: creating creative cross/transmedia content, modern journalism (both broadcast and online) and all the disciplines related to these including creative concepting, production, shooting, arranging sets, producing graphics, etc.

Working to transform this work at Yle to the Lean Culture with the people responsible for this work, we have often faced this question: “where are the benchmarks for an agile way of doing this?” This being journalistic work in news desks, creative transmedia productions, strategic prioritization of company key product portfolio etc.

After reaching out in our networks and making visits to several companies world-wide, we have come to the conclusion that it is us at Yle who have the task to create benchmarks in these areas.

That means our transformation work with experts of these disciplines is an exploration. We have adapted our ways for this:

* New ways of sharing what we have learned from experiments in various parts of the organization.
* Trainings which promote exploration together and adapting principles to different contexts over indoctrinating over set of principles and practices.
* Community events to increase shared understanding through collaborative sense-making.
* Demos where we share our new innovations and learnings from our mistakes and invite change agents from other organizations to share their stories.
* Building networked communities inside and outside our company, to share findings and to learn from individuals and companies from networks.

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